Learn Spanish Cognates!

You can learn Spanish cognates by learning a few simple rules and applying them
to your existing knowledge of English. In this way you can quickly expand your
Spanish vocabulary.

What are cognates? Simply put, they are words that exist in two languages
that are spelled exactly or almost exactly the same way and have the same
meaning. This makes it easier to learn much of the vocabulary of another
language. You simply use your knowledge of English vocabulary and apply the
rules that determine the spelling change between the two languages.

Spanish is a language that evolved from Latin over the last two thousand
years. English, although it is not as closely related to Latin as Spanish,
borrows thousands of words from Latin, many of them the same words that Spanish
uses. In addition, both languages have borrowed many words from Classical Greek.
This results in thousands of cognates between English and Spanish. This helps to
give us a leg up in learning Spanish vocabulary.

While some of the words with a common origin in Latin have different meanings
in the two languages (these are called false cognates), the vast majority of
them, 90% or more, have a similar enough meaning to be useful to us as we learn
Spanish.

The Michel Thomas series of language learning audio products uses cognates and knowledge of spelling changes as an easy way to use what you already know to get a handle on vocabulary.

Spelling. As you learn Spanish cognates, notice that many of these words also have a slightly different spelling from English, to conform to the rules of Spanish, and the pronunciation is almost always a little different.

Words that end in -a, -o, or -e very often drop or change this last vowel in English. Example - the Spanish word 'forma' simply drops the -a to become 'form' in English, but for 'positivo' we must change the -o to -e. This is easy to do when looking at the Spanish word, but the reverse is a little trickier. When looking at an English word, we don't necessarily know the gender of the Spanish cognate. When you learn the Spanish word, learn the gender with it. Knowing cognates is a quick shortcut, but it doesn't cover all the bases.

Watch out for some internal spelling changes. For instance, in Spanish double consonants like -tt, -nn and -mm are much more rare than in English, and the -rr is a different letter in Spanish - it is the highly trilled or rolled erre not the slightly trilled or tapped ere. The -cc is like in English 'accent' - the first c is hard like k and the second is soft like s. It is never like 'accumulate' where there is no soft s sound, which would be spelled with just one c.

The h sound is always silent in Spanish, and where it occurs in English words it often disappears in Spanish. There is no th in Spanish, the h is usually dropped and it is spelled and pronounced as just a t.

Words that start with st or sp in English often have a Spanish cognate with an added e in front. For example 'estado' equals English 'state'.

Many words in English have nearly identical Spanish cognates. Only the
pronunciation is different and, at most, a very little spelling change.

There are many Spanish cognates that end in -cion. The
equivalent English word ends in -tion. Note that all of these words have the
stress on the final syllable. Also, all of these words are feminine in gender.